Prospect Magazine Puts AIM Front-and-Center as Free-Speech Rebel
November 3, 2025
When I was a boy, neo-Nazis threatened to march on Skokie, Illinois, a town with a disproportionate number of Holocaust survivors. Aryeh Neier, then president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), defended the rights of the skinheads eventuating in a book, Defending My Enemy. The ACLU lost a sizeable number of paying members. Yet Neier cherishes that the absolutist position on speech—I might hate your words, but I shall defend to the death your right to say them—was fervently debated at dinner tables across the country, perhaps for the first time.
Fast forward almost half a century to the crisis surrounding speech in the United States today and edifying conversation has been swapped for rancour and recrimination. Only a few years ago, it seemed that a censorious left was swinging its bat, taking down all manner of people for reasons large, small and unfounded. “Getting cancelled” had become as regnant a concept in the culture as getting dissed, though with impacts far more consequential.
The genocidal war in Gaza flipped the ideological script. Students on campus, often of a left-wing sensibility, peacefully and at times intimidatingly demanded accountability for the crimes being prosecuted. But some of those perturbed by this sought to see the protesters muzzled. Conservative outfits such as Accuracy in Media, a media watchdog, took pains to restrict their speech, underwriting trucks that doxxed people, emblazoning protesters’ names on their sides as they drove around town, so that future firms would think twice before hiring them. The Trump administration wilfully joined the melee, making sensationalist claims about antisemitism running amok from sea to sea, or at least from university to university. Quashing unwanted speech became a racket to strip universities of resources and academic freedom. Defending my enemy had descended to decimating my enemy.
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